No Child Left Behind. Race to the Top. Everything’s Better with Blue Bonnet on It.

Notice the similarities between government education reform programs and other advertising campaigns? They both have catchy slogans. They both employ exaggeration, statistical deception, and cockamamie claims to sell their products. As a result, many in high places make hay, assumedly without experiencing a twinge of guilt over the campaign’s spewing of lies.

Thousands of teachers have converged upon Denver this week for the National Education Association’s annual convention. A great many of those educators, when it comes to government reforms in education, are mad as hell, and are not taking it anymore.

The dismay over standardized testing, Common Core and the like has folks up in arms in Colorado as well, as Denver Post stories published the past year bore out. The mile-high turmoil simply reflects dissent that is growing in school districts throughout America.

Why? Because it is so much political doggerel. Teachers know it. Principals know it. District superintendents know it. The emperor wears no clothes.

The emperor referred to here is none other than U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

The secretary is not without means to give a schooling to districts who dare to collide with his view of public education. In Hawaii, the governor and his appointed school board fawned over Duncan and his $75 million hand-out to set up the reform confines mandated by President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. When teachers balked in contract talks over evaluation designated by this program, Duncan and cronies let it be known that the easy money was as easily taken away. Result: the imposition of a last, best, and final offer.

In Washington, Duncan yanked federal dollars when lawmakers decided against using standardized test scores for teacher evaluation. Ironically, he did so using No Child Left Behind. This guy would seem to be a better fit in a Republican administration and the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. Yet many conservatives disavow Duncan and his methods, seeing the “reform” as a trespass against what has typically been states’ rights and local jurisdictions.

What likely will inflame many at this year’s NEA Convention is Duncan’s predilection to demand use of “value-added measures” based on standardized testing scores for evaluating teachers. Principals fall victim as well, and in a bizarre situation in Washington D.C., so do every adult employed at schools, even custodial staff.

This bit of voodoo is contrary to overwhelming research that calls it and the whole notion of standardized testing into question, not to mention its invalidity for use in evaluating teachers.

In April, the American Statistical Association found that “effects — positive or negative — attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors.”

Other researchers reported out similar findings in May, concluding that there was “little or no correlation between quality teaching and the appraisals that teachers received,” using Duncan’s measure of choice.

The secretary’s response to The Washington Post on the latest research was akin to saying “so what?” He brushed it aside, but one can bet that had the research supported his positions, he would have trumpeted it stridently.

Like those who would continue to peddle shoddy products in the face of reason, officials like Duncan will continue to pitch their wares until it is no longer politically expedient to do so.

Those who care about public education in America better hope that this latest snake oil campaign falls far enough from favor to be cast aside. Teachers could get hard to find.

Alan Isbell is a fourth-grade teacher at the Wailuku Elementary School in Wailuku, Hawaii. He is a delegate from the Hawaii State Teachers Association at this week’s National Education Association convention in Denver.